In the BBC’s new documentary The Search for Nicola Bulley, the woman who prompted a thousand headlines after going missing while walking her dog in St Michael’s on Wyre, Lancashire, quickly, gently becomes “Nicky”. It’s a small thing but a humanising one: this is a woman whose family loves and misses her furiously, whose lives will never be the same after her loss.
The hour-long programme – which retraces Bulley’s steps and explores the family’s plight and the subsequent furore around her disappearance – is unflinching in its exposure of their grief. But there is something else that comes through just as clearly: the importance of responsible media coverage around missing people.
Last week the charity Missing People launched new media guidelines to, in their words, “not only help find a missing person but also minimise the impact on those who miss them during a time of shock”. The guidelines are the first of their kind for the industry, but arguably long overdue. They set out best practice around disclosing private information about missing individuals and not speculating on why they might have gone missing, among other details on language use and the right to be forgotten if they are found.
In theory, most good journalists should know and practise this stuff already, but in reality there is a wild west of behaviours in the British press.
“It’s really hard to put guidelines in place because we’ve got to consider that people have freedom of speech, they’ve got the right to report on what they want,” Chantal Korcz, communications manager at Missing People, told me. “It’s about making journalists understand that when people are going through this, it is fragile – it’s a hard thing to deal with,” she added.
Having spent the past year at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism interviewing journalists, academics, activists and the family and friends of missing people for my research on how the media can improve its coverage of missing people, I can’t help but agree.
In the BBC documentary, it was telling when a Daily Mail social media journalist spoke with what felt like unfettered glee about just how many TikTok views her videos around Bulley had raked in. There are undoubtedly some excellent journalists out there covering missing cases with sensitivity and rigour, but overall the profession doesn’t come off particularly well in the documentary, reflecting the worst parts of our industry: the salacious headlines, the grief porn, the voyeurism.
The family of Anthony Stammers, who disappeared from Colchester, Essex, in 2012, recounted to me how distressed they were after a journalist knocked on their door early in the morning after he was reported missing. “I was distraught, totally and utterly distraught,” said Julie Stammers, Anthony’s mother. “I opened the door and gave her a mouthful and told her to get off the doorstep. A really terrible thing to do, just cold-call like that straight away.”
Beyond this comes the issue of how and why some missing cases are elevated to the stratosphere while others remain underreported. As many as 170,000 people go missing in the UK each year, and while only a tiny number remain missing long term, there is an even smaller number that the public learns about. Disappearances are all too often connected in the public imagination to abduction, when in reality they’re far more likely to be linked to mental health crises. While I understand why editors need to focus on the stories that have a sense of urgency or in which the disappearance is “unusual”, there are important stories lost in the creases. It’s in the public interest to diversify reportage on missing people, because the crisis reflects so many of society’s failings around health, homelessness, preventable accidents and, yes, even crime.
Though most editors would be loath to admit it, the fact that Bulley was a white, good-looking woman played a crucial role in how her story evolved. It’s not good enough for journalists and editors to point the finger at the public’s level of interest in a case when ultimately we are in control of coverage decisions that filter down into the public consciousness. “We had cases where we were looking for dead bodies in rivers running alongside Nicola Bulley that nobody was interested in,” Alan Rhees-Cooper, staff officer to the National Police Chiefs’ Council missing persons lead, told me.
Even so, most of the journalists I spoke to felt as though the furore could have been avoided if the police had been more open with the media. “Trust proper journalists, keep them informed, brief them off the record as needed: that’s the best way to manage coverage and ensure that it’s responsible,” one crime correspondent told me.
While there is limited evidence to suggest that media attention, excessive or otherwise, can lead to a positive outcome in missing-person cases, journalism coverage is a crucial part of the ecosystem that provides comfort to the family and friends of the missing, holds power to account and can potentially jolt the memories of those who have information about missing people’s whereabouts. It is in the public interest that journalists continue to tell these stories.
Bulley’s disappearance, as her family seems to understand, has become a case study in what not to do for the media, the police and those of us who create or consume content around missing people. Respecting them should be at the forefront of our minds, for at the heart of these stories are real people, real lives.
Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff is a journalist and a Reuters Institute journalist fellow
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